# the marshmallow does not need you to defend its racist name

- Link: https://tacobout.online/2026/09/08/the-worlds-most-racist-snack-follow-up/
- Published: 2026-09-08T19:38:29-05:00
- Author: schwegler

There are two kinds of posts on this website: the ones I labored over like they 
were going to be taught in a seminar someday, and the ones where I embed a strange
little video with a title that looks like it was generated by a haunted search bar.

Guess which one Google decided it had opinions about.

In July, I posted a short video about the chocolate-covered marshmallow treats that
have, in different places and at different times, been sold under names built out
of racist caricatures. It was mostly a “huh, that is bleak” drive-by. Then it started
showing up in the site’s search data next to queries like _most racist snack_, _racist
snack name_, and _the world’s most racist snack_. Not huge numbers, exactly, but
it is now one of the little site’s more persistent visitors. Apparently this is 
what the people need from taco ’bout it: snack-based colonial hangovers.

## it’s a marshmallow, not an archival document

The treat itself is straightforward: a biscuit or wafer base, a whipped marshmallow-
ish center, and a chocolate coating. Depending on where you are, a perfectly normal
name exists for it: _Schokokuss_ (“chocolate kiss”), _Schaumkuss_ (“foam kiss”),
or simply chocolate-coated marshmallow treat.

That is why the usual defense of “it’s just tradition” never quite works for me.
Tradition is not a force of nature. It is a series of choices that people keep making
because nobody has bothered to make a different one. We managed to put a marshmallow
on a wafer and enrobe it in chocolate. Surely we can also call it a chocolate kiss
without acting like someone has confiscated grandmother’s entire kitchen.

But the older names that linger in parts of Europe are where it gets ugly. Variants
translated to “Moor’s head,” “Negro’s kiss,” and other terms that turn an actual
racial category—or an old colonial fantasy of one—into a cute little product description.
The point was not just “it’s brown because chocolate.” The imagery attached to those
names did the rest: Blackness reduced to a cartoon head, a dark coating, a novelty.

![A chocolate-coated vanilla foam sweet with its white filling and wafer base exposed.](
https://i0.wp.com/tacobout.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/chocolate-kiss-cutaway.
jpg?resize=999%2C541&ssl=1)

Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

## the weird part is how small the fix is

No one is asking anyone to stop eating the thing. This is not a campaign against
snacks, which would be both doomed and personally offensive to me. It is a request
to stop using a name that makes a person’s identity into the punchline and then 
demanding everybody else treat the discomfort as an overreaction.

And the replacement names are not even bad. “Chocolate kiss” is kind of sweet. “
Foam kiss” has the energy of a discontinued 1980s perfume, but it is still leagues
better than making a confectionery aisle reenact colonial racism. The food is the
same food. The recipe has not been silenced. Nothing has been erased except the 
part nobody needed.

There is a particular kind of nostalgia that mistakes familiarity for innocence.
You grew up hearing a word, so it feels harmless; someone else hears the history
packed into it, and suddenly the word is political. But it was already political.
It just had the advantage of being old enough to pass as décor.

## anyway, congratulations to the algorithm

So yes: the original video is a weirdly effective little piece of internet detritus.
It points at something real, it has a title people are apparently compelled to type
into a search engine, and now it has earned itself a follow-up post in which I get
to say the obvious part out loud.

If you want the snack, have the snack. Just call it a snack. We are all capable 
of surviving a product rename, even if the internet’s search habits suggest we may
never stop being fascinated by the phrase “racist marshmallow.”

Further reading: [Swissinfo’s reporting on the Swiss debate](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/the-chocolate-treat-at-the-heart-of-a-swiss-racism-debate/45837126)
and [a 2019 study of media responses to the “Mohrenkopf” controversy](https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1320266/FULLTEXT01.pdf).